Really pretty bodge

Rating: 6/10 (12 July 2013)

This could have been amazing, but there are too many plot holes and pointless detours for it to fulfill my (not very high) expectations.
Not only does del Toro show no real understanding of what it means to be "Pacific" (culturally, geographically, in terms of the space or urban landscapes), he manages to conflate pretty much all of Asia into one gigantic stereotype - and those Australian accents were so bad I almost walked out!
At the end of the day, there were a few passingly good action scenes, and a couple of almost- brilliant moments of apocalyptic doom, but the lack of believable (or interesting) characters (and the fact that 3 of the male leads looked almost identical), paired with the absence of any engaging settings (most of the battles are in the ocean), make this a fairly sub-par offering.
And did I mention that accents were really, really terrible? With the lackluster performances from Martini and Kazinsky (a Brit and an American), you could have hired pretty much any Australian guy off the street to do better. And why are Aussie characters so often mean and have bull-dogs? Being stupid and having bull mastiffs would make more sense - or being stoners with an old collie or a cattle dog. But vengeful and competitive, with a British bull- dog? Nothing good to say about those two characters, at all. Waste of time.